Coach cracks the whip on Dangal

Dangal team is on great high with the victory, one man is certainly less than happy with the movie — Geeta Phogat’s coach.

Though everybody is raving about the filmic experience that Dangal is, one specific man in Ludhiana is enraged at the flick. Former leading national wrestling coach and Geeta Phogat’s coach through the 2010 Commonwealth Games, P.R. Sondhi is very upset at the depiction of his role in the movie, who is shown to be an inept and corrupt guy. Sondhi, who had trained Geeta through the 2010 Commonwealth Games, allows that his name was not used in the picture, but convicts the bad light it puts on national coaches. “I comprehend that you have to have some section of entertainment in each film, but to slog the coach’s image over the mud for the sake of masala is just erroneous,” he says angrily over a phone call from Phagwara, Punjab.

In the picture, Geeta’s trainer, Pramod Kadam, is exposed to be a narcissistic, publicity-hungry character, at continuous loggerheads with Mahavir Singh Phogat about training methods. One pressures on defence while the other claims on attack. There’s one point in the movie where the trainer even locks Mahavir up in a room, through his daughter’s match. Sondhi firmly denies any disputes with Phogat.

“I was one of the four trainers to train the Indian wrestling crew through the 2010 Commonwealth Games. The crew had Geeta and other women, counting Sakshi Malik. Through the complete process, certainly not did any of us have any type of battle with Phogat. All that locking him up in a room is also complete rubbish,” he states surely, saying that the women’s trainer for the 2012 Olympics games, O.P. Yadav, also had no such glitches with the wrestler.

Certainly, the trainer says that Mahavir was not even present for most of the drill sessions for the Commonweath games.

Sondhi is all applause for Mahavir Phogat, and praises his exertions for training his daughters to be national-level wrestlers. “I consider that it was some of the best work of his life. To be competent to groom two normal girls in a way that they are national-level wrestling winners is very admirable,” he signs off.